What programming languages are good for statistics?
I'm doing a bit more statistical analysis on some things lately, and I'm curious if there are any programming languages that are particularly good for this purpose. I know about R, but I'd kind of prefer something a bit more general-purpose (or is R pretty general-purpose?).
What suggestions do you guys have? Are there any languages out there whose syntax/semantics are particularly oriented towards this? Or are there any languages that have exceptionally good libraries?
Answer
No contest -- R as the main implementation of S (and one that happens to be proper Open Source and a GNU project as well).
Not only as the S language designed precisely for this purpose (see the books by John Chambers), but the rather rich support of domain-specific packages at CRAN is second to none: over 2000 packages with proper quality control, often authored by experts in the field.
The ACM sees it the same way when it gave the ACM Software Systems Award to John Chambers in 1998 with the following citation
John M. Chambers
For The S system, which has forever altered how people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data.
For reference, other winners of this award were TeX, Smalltalk, Postscript, RPC, 'the web', Mosaic, Tcl/Tk, Java, Make, ... Not a bad company to be in.
Now, if you 'only' want to collect and summarize some data just about any procedural or functional language will do. But if you want something that was designed for programming with data then R as the main S implementation it is.